Can anything be done to make people happier with their jobs? What can prevent people from overeating? Will people like beer with balsamic vinegar in it just because they’ve been told it contains a “secret ingredient”?

These are some of the questions that Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, has studied in his research over the years, which spans in scope from the weighty to the quotidian. He has attempted to puzzle out the intricacies of human motivation and decision making, and two threads that come up often in his research are why people so often make choices that leave them worse off, and how tweaking small things might ward off needless, irrational suffering.

So when he realized that reading and sending emails was consuming an ever-expanding portion of his time—Ariely regularly receives hundreds of emails a day, excluding spam—he wondered if there were something he and others could be doing differently in managing their online correspondence. What small behavioral tricks could he deploy to make the whole ordeal less stressful?

“Everybody recognizes how much we are destroying productivity with the current [way we] email,” Ariely told me. The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that knowledge workers spend a little over a quarter of their workdays managing email, and Ariely was drawn to thinking critically about something that so many people spend so much of their days on. “I care about the ways in which we mismanage our health, mismanage our money, and mismanage our time,” he says. “From all of those, time is probably the easiest place, not to optimize perfectly, but to make some substantial improvements.”

One feature of email that seemed to leave room for improvement is the fact that every new message, whether vitally urgent or completely worthless, warrants an immediate ping. This, despite the fact that most people have a hard time ignoring messages as they arrive. In a 2002 paper, for instance, researchers found that for 70 percent of messages, it took workers an average of only six seconds to react to a notification indicating an email was unread. (Perhaps, 15 years later, that average time has even gotten shorter.) And these interruptions come at a steep cost (in terms of both productivity and stress), as it takes a whileAstoundingly, it’s been estimated that it takes 25 minutes, on average, for a worker to return to a task after being interrupted—this appears to hold true even for quick diversions, such as sending a single email. for people to return to the task they were originally doing when they were made aware of the message’s arrival.

“The first thing we should question is this idea that all emails are created equal,” Ariely says. “Should each email be able to interrupt people? Is the email from someone’s boss as important as the weekly industry newsletter he’s signed up for?” To get a sense of the answer to these questions, he posted a survey on his blog asking respondents to review the last 40 emails they’d received, saying for each one how long they could’ve waited to read it: Right away? Two hours later? A week later? Never?

What he found was that roughly a third of messages did not clear the bar of needing to be seen at all, and only about a tenth of emails were considered important enough to need to be read within five minutes of receipt.

How Soon Does Any Given Email Need to Be Seen?

When asked to sort 40 recent emails by time-sensitivity, Ariely’s respondents said that the majority were not urgent.

Data: Dan Ariely

In this data, Ariely saw an inefficiency to target. Even though every email, by default, triggers a notification, it’s unlikely that any given email deserves one. So, with the help of some software developers he’d worked with in the past, he tried to come up with a way to tweak the default settings that are baked into email. The result of that work is Filtr, an app that lets users make simple rules, based on the sender, about when an email will show up in their inbox. For example, users can set it upWhen I tried Filtr myself, one clear pattern I noticed was that I was most eager to postpone (or forgo) seeing emails from corporations, but wanted to get emails from humans immediately. so that emails from family members show up immediately, but non-time-sensitive newsletters show up all at once, at the end of the day.Filtr’s concept isn’t entirely novel. Another, more popular tool is Unroll.me, a service that can bundle non-urgent emails to be viewed all at once. But Unroll.me does not have the temporal specificity of Filtr, and is oriented toward the culling of marketing emails and newsletters.

Ariely hasn’t done any widespread user-satisfaction surveys, but he says that so far Filtr is at the very least making his own digital life less exasperating. “Being able to filter it, and say, ‘Okay, those are the small subset that are actually important to get to, and the rest can wait,’ is a huge improvement to my well-being,” he says.

It’s possible that his anecdotal relief could have wider implications for other distressed emailers. “I think Dan’s idea is really intriguing,” says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine. Mark, who has published several studies demonstrating the toll that email-related stress takes on workers, would want to study Filtr’s effectiveness before arriving at any conclusions. But she finds the idea promising because it restores a degree of control, the loss of which she says is one of the main reasons people get stressed about email. “I think if people felt they had more control over their information, over their time, they would be a lot less stressed,” she says.

Ariely’s curiosity about email has not just led him to help create Filtr, but also Shortwhale, a web app that makes emails arrive in a form that’s easier for recipients to process. Sending a message to someone who uses Shortwhale means being directed to a webpage with a few questions such as “How urgent is this?” and “Do you need a reply?” In the form where senders are to enter their messages, they’re prompted to “Go straight to the point” and are encouraged to “Make this a multiple choice question” if possible.Some instructions on the page, such as the box one must check before sending the message to indicate that “I have followed Dan's requests and I believe my email is valuable to him,” might ring familiar to anyone acquainted with Ariely’s research about how to get people to be honest and follow rules.

Ariely, who is a happy user of Shortwhale, says that this additional information has been a boon because he normally would receive a high volume of email but little in the way of useful context. “What I’ve learned through Shortwhale is there are lots of ... people who just want to send me things and say, ‘just for your information.’ And it’s so good to know what people have in mind.”

The system, which Ariely says has a very small user base, does have its downsides. “There’s something a little bit obnoxious about Shortwhale, in the sense that you say, ‘When you write me, please write me this way,’” he says. “That puts more burden on you as the sender... I have to say that when I started with this, the arrogance involved in it really bothered me.” And besides, for the concept of Shortwhale to be truly powerful, it would need to be integrated into the email clients that everyone uses. “Just imagine how much sense it would make if the person who sent you an email had a way to very quickly tell you that for this email, they need a response within a week, or ‘no response necessary,’” he says. From his surveys, Ariely had learned of an expectations gap between senders who didn’t need responses and recipients who thought they might.

For now, Filtr and Shortwhale both remain niche widgets that dutifully serve the needs of their creator and a small handful of high-volume emailers who, like him, have gone out of their way to adopt them. But in Filtr, Gloria Mark, the informatics professor, sees the seed of a powerful idea—“batching,” or checking email at set times, in batches—that, if fleshed out and taken up more widely, could make countless people much less stressed out about email.

There are two different types of batching, the first more well-known than the second. Productivity bloggers extol the virtues of this first type of batching, which consists of checking email only at set times and handling them all at once, as opposed to addressing each one as it comes in. It is an appealing idea, and many are no doubt drawn to it because it appears to eliminate distractions. Whether it actually leaves people better off is hard to determine: When Mark studied this behavior, she found that batchers who received a lot of email rated themselvesOne notable obstacle in Mark’s area of study is that self-assessments of productivity are usually the best researchers can do—quantifying productivity is extremely difficult, and something that academics (and, obviously, businesses) think deeply about. “There's really no good objective measure of information work,” she says, adding, “For software developers, you can look at lines of code, but that's not a good measure because there's this concept of elegance in software, which is actually [about writing] fewer lines of code.” as more productive, but were no less stressed.

There is a second type of batching, one that Mark believes would get to the root of email-related stress. “I’ve argued for years, and I’ll explain why, that the organization should batch emails,” Mark says. What she means is that a company could set it up so that when emails are sent, their delivery is postponed until the next batch-delivery time. Mark imagines a situation where emails arrive in three waves: at the beginning of the day, after lunch, and at the end of the day. “The logic for doing that is because then everybody’s expectation is that emails only come three times a day,” she says, adding, “Everybody knows that everybody’s getting emails at a certain time.” The insight here is that what really makes email so stressful is the social expectation of a quick response—something individual batchers don’t have control over, but something an employer could.

Mark’s ideal system does allow for urgent communications, just not through email. If workers need to contact one another with time-sensitive requests, she says, they’d pick up the phone, send an instant message, or talk in person.When researching the effects of temporarily cutting off office workers’ email use, Mark found that some communications that normally would’ve been emailed just dropped out entirely. She mentioned one employee who, when working without email, started receiving fewer assignments. “His boss could have simply walked down the hall and given him the tasks. They weren't that far apart. But the boss just simply stopped because he didn't have that email channel.” Mark’s explanation? “It has to do with the social cost. It's much less of a social cost for me to request something via email.”

Her solution, though elegant, is probably not likely to catch on anytime soon, because it’d require rewriting the digital-communication social contract. Lately, though, Mark says that in her life, email hasn’t been the prominent stressor it once was. These days, it’s something else. “I find myself checking the news every break that I get,” she says. “It’s replaced email by a long shot.”

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”